I found the Lifestreams storage model to be very interesting, but for me it certainly did not seem to provide an intuitive information organization structure. My primary mental (and physical) organization model is based on taskflow, not timeflow. I don't think I could tell someone what events were occuring across taskflows at any particular moment in my life but I don't see that I would often want to do that. The big pile of chronologically presented stuff interface really didn't appeal to me. However, since one can create sub-streams on the fly, I suppose a task flow presentation of information is easily produced and a presentation of sub-streams could be the primary interface for a task-oriented user. The integrative function of Lifestreams is really intriguing, however, though the article doesn't provide enough information on the "stream filtering" function to give me a good feel for how effective resource integration would really be. It seems that the filtering process presumes a level of resource description that isn't presently available in most desktop applications (at least, not automatically generated description).
Posted by amdonovan at February 25, 2003 12:36 PMFor me, the Lifestreams model was very exciting. I think that I would adapt very well to this type of document chronicling tool. My real-life desk is a bit of a Lifestream in an of itself ... little piles of paper stacked about with the most recent on top and the oldest at the bottom ... except for bills which are stacked with the newest at the bottom of the pile.
One question I had about Lifestream's design was over the find tool. The article said that a user would prompt a search query by typing something like "all email I haven't responded to" or "all email to Schwartz" (81). What I am curious about is would the system understand that level of language or would it just pick up keywords and create substreams from those ... thus making the entry of sentences more of a "warm-fuzzy" for human users but unecessary for the program to perform?
This article was intriguing. I consider myself to be a pretty organized person, but I don't feel that the naming scheme I use for my computer documents is very useful. Being able to catalog items without having to explicitly name and place them would really be helpful. I wish the author had included a better description on the find/filtering functions. It seems that these are the most important features for this type of storage system.
The Unix viewport was not appealing, unfortunately. While I understand the stream metaphor, I think I would prefer a different representation - the one shown looks too much like a million open windows.
Posted by: Tara on February 25, 2003 04:00 PMI wasn't too excited by Lifestreams, either, although I can see how it might work. I think John Leggett demo'd a similar interface for a class last summer, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.
In some ways, Lifestreams is organized like a blog, in chronological order. I'd want the opportunity to assign my own keywords to important items as well as having the system do it for me. A feature that allowed you to later on remap old keywords to new ones would be helpful in maintaining a consistent set.
The bibliography manager I use, EndNote, works this way to some degree. Everything I enter lives in one master file (easy to back up) and I assign keywords to each record. I can link individual records to documents on my hard drive, too, to simplify finding things. I can search and create subsets of records on the fly, and I can sort and rearrange them as needed. I don't think I can create multiple sets simultaneously, but searching is easy enough that it hasn't been a problem (also, currently I have fewer than 1000 records, although in my previous grad school experience I had over 3000).
I suppose in part I resent the statement that "the state of the art is a messy desk" as a reason why the current metaphor doesn't work. I like to keep a very clean desk, both in reality and virtually. Everything is neatly organized into files; documents are stored on my Linux machine (and can be automatically archived and accessed remotely), with one or more virtual machines running on top to give me access to different programs. I wish that there were more associative ways to group documents rather than in a hierarchical file structure, and I do suffer from the problem described in"Life beyond the mailbox" of having multiple file structures (one for email, one for documents, one for bookmarks, one for contacts, etc.).
Posted by: dcplumer on February 25, 2003 04:35 PM